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About Michael J. Miller

Miller, who was editor-in-chief of PC Magazine from 1991 to 2005, authors this blog for PC Magazine to share his thoughts on PC-related products. No investment advice is offered in this blog. All duties are disclaimed. Miller works separately for a private investment firm which may at any time invest in companies whose products are discussed in this blog, and no disclosure of securities transactions will be made.

But one thing struck me as missing from most of these lists: the underlying chips that make many of these new products work. Now I'm not talking about CPUs like AMD's Phenom II - AMD and Intel get plenty of attention. Instead, I'm talking about chips that will turn out to play an important role inside the next generation of phones, TVs, and other CE products.

For instance, for me, one of the most impressive sets of demonstrations was that offered by Broadcom. One tiny chip aimed at cell phones can record 720p video at 30 frames per second in H.264 format. Now of course, we've seen phones that can capture video before, but products like this should mean that this feature is going to be standard in all kinds of inexpensive phones. Another chip combined 802.11n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and FM reception and transmission again all in a tiny chip. I don't know that every phone needs this combination, but I can imagine some neat devices with it.

Broadcom, like many vendors, was also pushing the idea of home connectivitity, showing TVs, phones, set-top boxes and printers all working together using DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) standards. All sorts of other vendors had DLNA-compliant products as well, with Microsoft saying it would be a part of Windows 7. I've heard this before, but based on products I saw from just about everyone, it may actually happen this time.

Of course, other vendors had very interesting chips as well. I was particularly interested in a number of new application processors for higher-end cell phones and similar devices. Marvell showed a 1 GHz processor called the PXA168 aimed at applications such as bringing web surfing to digital photo frames ; or for personal navigation devices or portable music players. Qualcomm showed off its Snapdragon processor, also running at 1 GHz, focusing on running the Android mobile operating system. Samsung Semiconductor had an interesting chip designed for higher-end phones and personal navigation devices that includes multimedia feature (such as codecs for HD video), hard-wired graphics acceleration, and an ARM core. nVidia was showing its Tegra chip that seems aimed at machines somewhere between smartphones and netbooks (as well as its Ion platform, which is essentially a 9400M notebook chipset paired with an Intel Atom CPU, which it believes will result in better performing low-cost netbooks.) Analog Devices showed a low-power version of its MEMS motion sensor, the kind used in the Nintendo Wii controller, designed to bring direction sensing and more to mobile devices.

And of course, there was lots of activity for solid state drives, using NAND flash memory chips to replace hard drives in lightweight notebooks or in enterprise applications. Sandisk, Toshiba, and Samsung Semiconductor all showed new drives, with Kingston showing off a drive using Intel's drive technology. All the vendors claim big speed performance over the first generation drives; I'm waiting to see that.

Other than CPUs and occasionally new graphics processor, chip technology typically gets overlooked. But in many respects, it's what drives the computers and consumer electronics products we all want to see.

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